Sure, politicians in their comfortable offices in Washington, DC, didn’t intend to help starve the world’s poor. But biofuel policy is requiring conversion of food to fuel and contributing to higher corn prices, so having that effect.

6 thoughts on “American biofuel policy increases hardship on the Guatemalan poor, and you help every time you buy gasoline”

Environmentalists seem to be completely oblivious about the unintended consequenses of their favorite policies. Which seem to be particularly prone to being hijacked by special interests, and to hurting the poor and downtrodden. It gives me the feeling that they would be perfectly happy to see all of those little brown people starve to death.

And sowing and harvesting corn and then converting it to ethanol and then using it emits the same amount (sorry, not sure if that is per gallon or per unit of energy, as ethanol only delivers two-thirds the energy of gasoline) than converting crude oil to gasoline and using that gasoline. It’s a scam all around!

Guatemalan farmers suffer the same effects of ‘free’ trade with the US as their Mexican neighbors did, simply a decade later. Several million Mexican corn farmers abandoned farms due to cheap, subsidized, mechanized US imports. Mexican agriculture was knocked reeling from NAFTA in the ’90s while today Guatemala is hurt by the CAFTA treaties signed by the less competent Bush in the 2000s.